Do we like Fiona Wood?
Our score: 7 out of 10. Nothing harmful found and real volunteer work on record, but the public record is thin, so it stops short of the top end.
Fiona Wood is a Melbourne writer who took the long way round to novels. She wrote a book in Year 8, worked as a freelance journalist, studied screenwriting at RMIT, then wrote TV scripts for about twelve years, including on The Secret Life of Us.
Her first YA novel, Six Impossible Things, landed with Pan Macmillan after a former TV colleague, Simmone Howell, helped get it there. Wildlife and Cloudwish followed, and her agent later struck a three-book deal in the US. It's a solid, hard-working arc rather than an overnight splash.
On the harm test, nothing nasty turned up. In a 2013 chat with Howell she argued that YA fiction can help push back on attitudes against gay people and women. That's her own stated view, and it fits the books she writes.
On Cloudwish she took on a Vietnamese-Australian lead character, which is a brave thing for a white author to try. That's from her own account in a 2016 interview, where she also talked about her volunteering. We didn't open any critical reviews, so we can't say how the representation landed.
The good stuff is real. She's an ambassador for the Stella Prize Schools Program and the Ardoch Youth Foundation's Own a Word program, tutors mothers of students at Friday Night School, and is on the leadership team of Befriend a Child in Detention. She called offshore detention of asylum seekers “a disgrace”.